Wikipedia:Cleaning up vandalism manually

This article gives advice on how to clean up vandalism manually through the recent changes feed, also known as the "old school" way of cleaning up vandalism. Sometimes you need to do so when Huggle or STiki fails, or you have problems installing them, or any other reason. There are several things to check for, such as change in page size, edit summary, and tags. Do NOT check every change. Due to the high volume of edits per minute, checking every diff link will waste a lot of time, and you won't have time to check them all before new entries come in. Choose suspicious entries to patrol, which will be covered in the following sections.

A recent changes entry looks something like this:

This is an important thing to check for, since blanking will be easily spotted in it.

Note that the "-10,000" is in bold, making it easier to spot. This large change in page size indicates blanking, so go ahead and hit "undo" right away. If you have rollback you can use it, since it appears right next to the entry.

There are also tags and automatic edit summaries when a user blanks a page (and does not leave an edit summary for the latter)

If there is a large addition to the page, it is also worth checking out. These vandals might have added a whole chunk of Lorem ipsum to the page, sometimes to make it load very slow, or to overload the servers, although that is unlikely.

Vandals will often use the following edit summaries to hide their wrongdoings:

Look how the vandal tries to blend in with the other edits. (But sorry vandals, this actually makes you more visible.) The edit seems legitimate by its entry in the recent changes, but is actually vandalism.

Just revert them without even looking at all. Unambiguous vandalism.

are good indicators of vandalism, and it is a good idea to check the tags on an edit.

A large portion of vandalism comes from mobile edits. They are often followed with the "mobile web edit" or "mobile app edit" tag.

A list of obvious tags include:

Check them immediately, although ClueBot NG may have reverted it before you can even load the page, due to how obvious that type of vandalism is. (It's always nice to beat that bot to vandalism)

It is always a good idea to check the user's periodically if you spot existing user warnings added recently on their talk page. These vandals are likely to repeat their actions so monitor their contributions. If you have Twinkle (see below), sometimes you can revert their edits directly without checking the diff links, although it is always good to check for good faith edits.

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